Torchwood Declassified

Investigating Mainstream Cult Television

Rebecca Williams

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781780761770
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857734358
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television

Torchwood started its life on television as a spin-off from Doctor Who, bringing Captain Jack to join new colleagues in a television series that quickly established itself as fresh and watchable television. It's fourth series, subtitled 'Miracle Day', continued its move from the niche channel of BBC3 to metamorphose into an international production between the BBC and the US network Starz. Torchwood has continued to entertain, provoke and attract large audiences and an expanding fandom. This is the first critical celebration of Torchwood across it four series, considering issues of representation, the fandom that surrounds the show and its complex, institutional contexts.
Focusing in particular on how the meanings and understandings of cult television have shifted and become subject to technological, industry and marketing changes in recent years, Torchwood Declassified explores topics including the show's aesthetics and branding, its use of tropes from the horror genre, vast tie-in merchandise, status as a spin off, the nature of a celebrity that is both cult and mainstream, as well as the use of sound and music and of cult writers, and Torchwood's connection to place and location. The book will appeal to fans of the series, researchers and scholars, and anyone interested in ongoing questions over what cult television is, what it means, and why it continues to be of importance.

Part I

MEDIA INSTITUTIONS, BRANDING AND MULTI-PLATFORMING

ACCESS DENIED? NEGOTIATING PUBLIC SERVICE AND COMMERCIAL TENSIONS THROUGH TORCHWOOD’S INTERTEXTUAL BARRICADE

Ross P. Garner

Introduction

Much of the emerging academic work discussing Torchwood has foregrounded the programme’s appeal(s) to ‘cult’ audiences as the key interpretive framework through which to explore the series. Matt Hills’ discussion of Torchwood within The Essential Cult TV Reader explicitly demonstrates this point¹ but Rebecca Williams’ analysis of how the series ‘has linked representations of horror with location’² is premised upon wider associations between the horror genre and the academic study of ‘cult’ television.³ Similarly, Umberto Eco’s argument equating ‘cult’ status with intertextuality and a ‘rickety’ textual structure⁴ can be identified in Andrew Ireland’s assessment that:

[i]t is the unusual fusion of science fiction drama, soap, sex, violence, representation of bisexuality and homosexuality, notions of the gothic and the uncanny, the Other and the hero, that makes [Torchwood] such a ‘fresh’ text to study.⁵

This preceding work has made associations between Torchwood’s production context and its ‘textual strategies’,⁶ such as Williams’ recognition that horrific imagery for the ‘Children of Earth’ miniseries ‘need[ed] to be “toned down” for the imagined audience of BBC1’.⁷ Nevertheless, prioritising the series’ myriad overlaps with ‘cult’ discourses overlooks other ways of critically engaging with Torchwood. For example, from the perspective of Torchwood’s industrial commissioning and development, one key element of the programme is its status as a ‘spin-off’ from Doctor Who. Spin-off products are, as will be outlined in this chapter, frequently associated with commercially motivated production contexts and the priorities of these generate tension in relation to Torchwood’s institutional development since it is a product of the BBC’s ongoing public service responsibilities. This chapter uses Torchwood as a case study partly for exploring wider issues surrounding the intersections between ‘public service’ and ‘commercial’ televisual systems by demonstrating how the production of spin-off texts is shaped by, and responds to, issues arising from the national broadcasting context of commissioning. However, rather than subscribing to simplistic oppositions between ‘commercial’ and ‘public service’ television models, this chapter instead recognises that the BBC combines ‘public service’ and ‘commercial’ requirements in its contemporary practices.⁸

The structure of the chapter is as follows: firstly, existing scholarly ideas regarding the spin-off are reviewed to demonstrate how these have been primarily framed in terms of commercial discourses concerning the exploitation of textual elements (e.g. characters) that have proven popularity with audiences. As becomes evident, this set of ideas becomes complicated if applied to Torchwood since its status as a spin-off from ‘the family-friendly Doctor Who’ generates tensions for the BBC concerning its institutional responsibilities towards protecting child audiences from Torchwood’s aforementioned ‘adult’ themes.⁹ The remainder of the chapter then explores the various strategies implemented by the BBC within both promotional material for Torchwood and the text itself to discourage children from watching. The discussion primarily focuses on the construction and negotiation of an ‘intertextual barricade’ between Torchwood and the diegesis of its parent series throughout the former’s four series and notes how, even during instances where this barricade becomes relaxed and/or crossed, anxieties remain identifiable. Thus, Torchwood may well be ‘a unique television drama series’ but this chapter argues that this classification comes partly from the divergent pressures working upon the series due to its continually shifting production context and the strategies employed for ‘(re-)negotiating the series’ relations with its parent series.¹⁰

Constructing the barricade: Torchwood -as-spin-off, Torchwood -as-public service product

Within television studies, discourses engaging with ‘spin-off’ programmes frequently account for the genesis of these series by stressing their commercial logic. Peter S. Grant and Chris Wood demonstrate this interpretive approach by discussing how the initial success of the original CSI has been capitalised on by its producers. The subsequent appearances of CSI: Miami, and then CSI: New York, are viewed as examples of a process of ‘cloning previous successes through sequels, prequels or “franchise” extensions’ that is further identifiable within the American television industry through such examples as Law and Order.¹¹ These practices are viewed negatively by Grant and Wood since they argue that ‘[w]hatever their creative merit, every clone absorbs money and screen time that might otherwise bring audiences a new voice or different perspective on the world’.¹² Overlapping interpretations of spin-offs are evident elsewhere in television studies. Jonathan Bignell defines such programmes as ‘designed to exploit the reputation, meaning or commercial success of a previous one’¹³ whilst Jonathan Hardy names spin-offs as one component of the widespread ‘commercial intertextuality’ dominating industrial practices at present.¹⁴ Irrespective of the value judgements made concerning their (lack of) creativity, the dominant discourse surrounding television spin-offs is drawn from wider media and cultural studies perspectives which posit that new products generated by profit-driven systems are primarily ‘meant to serve the function of creating synergy by locating a successful device and carrying it to another’.¹⁵ The recurrence of this stance in academic work discussing production processes within ‘mainstream’ American cinema provides one example of how entrenched these ideas are.¹⁶

Locating Torchwood’s first series in relation to established discourses concerning ‘the spin-off’ is problematic, however. On the one hand, the programme’s inclusion of Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman), a character introduced during the first series of the re-launched Doctor Who, as one of Torchwood’s lead characters is readable as a ‘clever marketing’ strategy used by the programme’s producers to ‘increas[e] the possibility that a viewer hooked on one … series … may become an avid viewer of the other’.¹⁷ A reading of Torchwood that settles purely upon the ‘commercial’ logic underpinning the series’ genesis is too reductive, however. What this overlooks is how the programme’s status as a series commissioned by the BBC under public service requirements impacts upon Torchwood’s (initial and ongoing) status as a spin-off. Most significant to understanding Torchwood in this context is the fact that, since returning in 2005, parent series Doctor Who has established itself as a ‘“consensus” audience grabber’¹⁸ through continually demonstrating ‘broad demographic appeal … and … be[ing] viewed by the whole family’.¹⁹ The ‘dark, wild and sexy’ tone intended for Torchwood in the press release announcing its commissioning is therefore immediately problematic for the BBC since, from an institutional perspective, it suggests divergent pulls operating across the programme’s development.²⁰ This is because, since Doctor Who’s cross-generational appeal includes children, Torchwood’s status as a spin-off from Doctor Who compromises some aspects of the BBC’s charter. Throughout its history, the BBC has been continually required to display ‘responsibility to avoid harmful material’ for children.²¹ This means that children have long been recognised as ‘an institutional category’ within the BBC and have consequently been addressed as such in terms of both programming provision and regulation of content.²² Consequently, the Corporation has adopted what some have viewed as a ‘paternalistic’ attitude towards children and the programming produced for them.²³ This stance continues today since the internally imposed service licence for the BBC’s child-centred CBBC channel states that ‘CBBC should provide a stimulating, creative and enjoyable environment that is also safe and trusted’.²⁴ Rather than simply creating a series that would establish an audience off the back of popular characters in Doctor Who, then, specific strategies would have to be mobilised for Torchwood to achieve crossover appeal whilst simultaneously discouraging children from experiencing the programme’s ‘sex-fuelled viscera’.²⁵ On a wider level, though, the tensions between public service responsibilities and audience expectations for spin-off programmes mean that the development of Torchwood’s first series complicates established ideas concerning such forms of programming in television studies.

To address anxieties regarding child viewers, Torchwood’s producers chose to instigate a variety of strategies to downplay the programme’s appeal to young audiences – starting with the series’ initial press release. Davies’ statement that Torchwood would be ‘X Files meets This Life’ is significant because of the intertextual associations it forges with preceding forms of TV drama.²⁶ The X-Files has an established position within scholarly discourse (and beyond) as a programme that generated ‘cult’ appeal amongst audience groups,²⁷ whilst also courting ‘quality’ demographics through its ‘visual … emphasis on concealment’ that allowed fantastic and horrific imagery to be depicted without excessive gore.²⁸ At the same time, comparing Torchwood to This Life activates associations...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Torchwood: Bridging the Mainstream/Cult Rift Rebecca Williams
• Part I: Media Institutions, Branding and Multi-Platforming
• Part II: Torchwood, Aesthetics and Televisuality
• Part III: Torchwood, Place and Location
• Part IV: Torchwood’s Reception and Audiences
• Select Bibliography
• List of Television Series & Films